The X Files: Hamish Bowles Auditions for X Factor

The author, masquerading as hairdresser Leo Mercuré, in Jean Paul Gaultier and a Rod Keenan New York top hat, with Simon Cowell.

Sittings Editor: Kathryn Neale

Photographed by Joseph Cultice

Video: Courtesy of Fox

You might wonder at the latest Vogue hazing project that saw me lying facedown on the floor of a little Chelsea studio, fully dressed but for bare feet that anchored a thick blue rubber band I was pulling up with outstretched hands while I repeated over and over the self-debasing mantra “Mini, mini, mini, mini me!” Or five flights up in a West Village aerie on one of the hottest days of the year with my hands pressed firmly to the wall and legs apart, screaming, “Woof woof woof” to an imaginary friend while an elfin girl with fairy tattoos on her arms told me to pretend that I was moving a table and to sound “like a big dumb dog.” Or standing at a baby grand rather surprisingly located in a subterranean bedroom in the nosebleed heights of Riverside Drive channeling Bea Arthur while singing Britney Spears.

I had to read the e-mail from the editor in chief several times to be quite sure. There, buried like a time bomb in a bouquet, was this chilling sentence: “I have signed you up to compete in The X Factor.”

I had watched the wildly successful U.K. X Factor from the cozy depths of a cozy sofa in the Cotswolds, tingling with Schadenfreude at the hapless contestants whose subpar performances were mercilessly eviscerated by Simon Cowell, and thrilling to those moments when a star was born—as when a 21-year-old receptionist named Leona walked into her first audition, sang “Over the Rainbow” with no accompaniment, and proved that she had a voice to match her golden beauty. By the time the almost criminally gifted Leona reached the finale, I had frantically dialed in my vote. Though I still like to think that it made a difference, I clearly wasn’t alone in my opinion: In the U.K. at the time, four million people bought Leona Lewis’s album Spirit, making it the fastest-selling debut ever.

Now Simon Cowell is bringing the X Factor juggernaut to the States, and I am being thrown under it.

“You can sing,” says Anna, who has heard me warble some comedic Noël Coward songs at the Rug Company during Fashion’s Night Out. “This will be easy for you.” Her enthusiasm buoys me along, until a moment over dinner at the Metropolitan Opera—after Jonas Kaufmann’s celestial voice during Act I of Die Walküre has brought tears to my eyes—when she insouciantly announces that she is, in fact, completely tone deaf.

At 6:30 a.m. on a glacial April morning I find myself at the Prudential Center in desolate downtown Newark, New Jersey, one of six X Factor audition centers across the United States (there are also video booths in Honolulu; Anchorage; Kansas City, Kansas; Denver; and Phoenix; potential contestants who cannot get to any of these venues can audition via YouTube). The odd soul in a puffa jacket clasping a coffee wanders by. I wonder if anyone will turn up, but when I round the corner, there, neatly corralled into great glittering blocks of humanity, are 20,000 hopefuls (from twelve-year-olds to nonagenarians), their ranks swelled by supportive family and friends who have queued for hours to collect the numbered wristbands that will stay with them for as long as they remain in competition. Some have traveled for hours by Greyhound bus. People are bundled against the cold; there are pink Gaga wigs, chicken-feather boas, and glitter shoes galore. The mood is euphoric. As Katy Perry’s “Firework” plays, a disembodied voice screams, “Someone could be leaving with $5 million. Do we have the X Factor here today?”

Hours later 1,000 giddy contestants have earned their “golden” tickets, meaning they will return to be whittled down to a final 160 who will ultimately audition here in front of Simon, Paula Abdul, L. A. Reid, Nicole Scherzinger, and an audience of 4,000. “Don’t give up on your dreams!” someone shouts as the rejected contestants shuffle out. Some of them sing spontaneously on the sidewalks—many are disturbingly good. I talk to some of the yellow-ticket holders. Among them are Bieberesque teens with years of professional training, middle-aged women who joined their church gospel choirs in childhood, a 70-year-old wedding singer who has been performing since the 1950s. My stomach is starting to form elaborate macramé knots.

I clasp my ill-gained golden ticket (number 39910) like a badge of shame and grow determined to justify its possession. It’s been decided that I will leapfrog these early elimination rounds and perform for the judges on June 8 under an assumed name; they will know there is a Vogue editor in the lineup, but I won’t be announced as such. I have only two months to mold a quavering voice that is clearly in need of all the help it can get.

Singing for me has always been a joyous but private pleasure that connects me in a lyric thread to my beloved grandmother Alice. When I was a little boy, Grandma would bedazzle me with her virtuosity at the upright piano that sat in her velvet-shrouded living room. I would listen enraptured as Grandma’s heavy rings on the ivories added a percussive flourish to the signature Liberacean arpeggios with which she fleshed out the wistful strains of songs she and my grandfather had fallen in love to, Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do?” and Noël Coward’s “I’ll See You Again” among them. Grandma’s lovely trilling voice had the prewar timbre of the great musical-comedy stars of her youth—including Jessie Matthews and Jeanette MacDonald—and when I joined her for a singsong my unbroken voice naturally took on something of this larklike resonance.

As a boy soprano in the high school choir I later sang a solo during the carol service at Canterbury Cathedral, but I was too young to secure the Freddy Eynsford-Hill role in our production of My Fair Lady—and far too timid to have thought to audition for it. Any Broadway dreams I may have harbored languished for decades until Fashion’s Night Out unleashed the caterwauling diva within—an experience made not only possible but actually wildly enjoyable after the services of the effervescent Charlie Alterman were secured as accompanist and coach. When he wasn’t nurturing my misplaced dreams of stardom, Charlie moonlighted as the musical supervisor of the Tony-laureled Next to Normal, which meant we occasionally rehearsed in an atmospherically grungy room at the Booth Theater. Charlie taught me how to pace a line and land a joke and provided a performance style that brought memories of Grandma flooding back.

So when it seemed that there was no extracting myself from the X Factor calamitarium, my first call was to Charlie, who greeted the news with characteristic enthusiasm. Up to Riverside Drive I hied to leaf through his library of show tunes and establish a list of prospective audition numbers that would play to my as-yet-undetermined strengths. Simon Cowell’s video on the X Factor Web site stressed the importance of one’s song choices and suggested going for the unexpected—a guy choosing a number associated with a female singer, for instance. Thus bidden, Charlie and I romped through the Judy Garland songbook and dithered over “The Man That Got Away” and “Smile.” We considered Adele’s “Someone Like You” and toyed with Madonna’s “Vogue.” We looked at Cole Porter and listened to Al Bowlly. We tried the symbolic “The Winner Takes It All” and “Thank You for the Music” from the Abba oeuvre (even Charlie drew the line at “Dancing Queen”). So many songs, so little time.

In the midst of all this kerfuffle I was invited to a dinner at Le Cirque for the San Francisco doyenne Denise Hale. To my unquantifiable delight Denise had placed me next to her erstwhile stepdaughter Liza Minnelli. Fortified by a second glass of champagne, I decided to brave asking Liza her advice. “What about ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’?” she suggested sweetly, in a fidget of eyelashes and Halston cashmere. “Just kinda talk through it and then sing the last bit real pretty, so that’s what they’ll remember,” she counseled, doing just that by way of example. “And remember to sing every song as if it’s the last time you are ever going to sing it!”

For my second FNO performance, the absurdly talented Cheyenne Jackson had graciously agreed to sing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” with me. When he opened his mouth during our first rehearsal, the power of the sound that emerged practically shot me across the room. I asked Cheyenne for his thoughts on the songs that I would be least expected to perform. He promptly e-mailed a list that included such potential Bowlesian pearls as “I Kissed a Girl,” “Teenage Dream,” and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me.” I was delighted to see that he had also suggested Britney’s “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” a song that Charlie and I had been playfully tinkering with already. Cheyenne’s endorsement sealed the deal. And for a change of mood, we would also prepare the Charlie Chaplin composition, “Smile.”

Then, over dinner in Los Angeles, I asked Jane Lynch what initially drew her to the concept of Glee. “There’s nothing more vulnerable than expressing yourself through song,” Jane told me. “It’s raw. It’s so out there. It’s one thing to write a poem or do a painting, and you kind of walk away and go, Look at what I did. But this, it’s within you. It’s all you. You are the instrument.” Panic ensued: How on Earth was I going to fine-tune my rusted instrument and dodge the slings and arrows on which Mr. Cowell has built his outrageous fortune?

The answer lay in the Chelsea studio of the distinguished vocal coach and therapist Joan Lader, who through the years has reportedly guided the iconic voices of such luminaries as Patti LuPone, Madonna, and Björk. After my giddy sing-alongs on Riverside Drive, the sessions chez La Lader were the last word in no-nonsense professionalism. Joan sized up my instrument, noted the time frame, and left me in no doubt about the almost insurmountable challenges ahead. Joan was worried about the antics on Riverside Drive. “I don’t want you getting a polyp,” she said firmly, “not on my watch.”

The morning before lesson two, I had delivered an hour-and-a-half lecture to the elegant ladies of the Colony Club and chatted up a storm over the lunch that followed. By the time I arrived at Joan’s I had a speaking voice like a corncrake, and we spent the entire hour working on exercises to stretch and massage my larynx. I soon realized that the voice is a tremendously fragile and fallible instrument.

Fortunately, Joan’s technical precision was giddying. As the weeks rolled on and I went up and down the scales and blathered about moody poodles and mooses and intoned the shamelessly inaccurate but oft-repeated assertion that my mother married Marvin in May, I began to identify so strongly with My Fair Lady’s Eliza Doolittle that I woke up at night in a cold sweat having dreamed I had swallowed a mouthful of marbles and a chorus of maids in mobcaps was harmonizing “Poor Professor Higgins” around my deathbed. “We’re creeping along,” said Joan, “but you certainly have made progress.”
I was also throwing myself at every show I could; my sessions with Joan gave me a deepening respect for performers of every sort. After a performance of Company at Lincoln Center, I sat next to Martha Plimpton, who had so delighted me in the 2008 revival of Pal Joey with her intoxicating rendition of Rodgers and Hart’s witty “Zip.” How did she maintain her voice through eight performances a week? Our Joan Lader is how. “Find the beam!” said Martha. In Company she played opposite Stephen Colbert. Even he could sing.

Joan’s lessons were revelatory, and although the sessions with Charlie were confidence-boosting, with the crashing realization that I had barely two weeks to go until my Waterloo, I felt I needed a further crammer in song delivery. Teacher and vocal artist Wendy Parr’s fifth-floor walk-up proved my new home from home. In my first lesson with Wendy I learned how to hold a microphone—a fundamental I hadn’t even thought of. We were running up and down my scales, finding my “head voice,” hooting like Anita Baker, and absorbing a roster of subtle gestures to help me remember lyrics and phrasings. “Your voice is working,” said Wendy. “We need to get to the next layer. Having fun, getting lost in the experience. When you’re cutting loose, your heart’s in it—that’s when you actually sound the best, too.”

Meanwhile, I had to work on my X Factor identity. I scoured the works of Noël Coward for a suitable nom de croon and settled on Leo Mercuré, the playwright in Coward’s ménage à trois in Design for Living—astrologically, I am in fact a Leo, and the mercurial allusion seemed to fit the transformative nature of my alter ego. “It’s a little Freddie Mercury, too,” said Wendy, “which is cool.”

To give Leo his own look, the stylist Thom Priano produced a Karen Elson fright wig that brought to mind John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant (maybe I should have done “An Englishman in New York”?). I opted for a dye job instead. It may indeed have been “between chocolate and espresso,” but I looked like von Aschenbach gasping his last on the Lido in Venice. At least the darkened brows were transformative. My performance ensemble included a Philip Treacy fedora, Christian Louboutin rock-star golden crystal shoes, and a Mugler bum freezer that was giving me a bit of Bowie.

For my final lesson with Joan, Charlie joined as the accompanist. I gave it my all. After my Britney rendition, Joan emitted a genuine chuckle. “It’s improved so much,” she said. “I think it’s a hoot. You’re going to have fun!” I could have put a rose between my teeth and waltzed her around the room singing a rousing chorus of “The Rain in Spain.”

I am bidden to preserve my voice, a stricture I follow to the letter. The night before the audition, my nerves in tatters, I book tickets for American Ballet Theatre’s Lady of the Camellias, rightly calculating that a couple of hours of Frédéric Chopin and Roberto Bolle’s calves would prove suitably distracting. Unfortunately the friends who accompany me clearly fail to grasp the plot in John Neumeier’s opaque staging. Having taken a Trappist vow of silence, I sit through our postperformance Chinese meal in increasing exasperation until I can take no more and I write out the entire story, with illustrations, on the paper tablecloth, to their immense amusement.

The sweltering morning brings fresh terror.

As our cars near Newark, an urgent call comes from the producer asking for my entire set list—of five songs. Lest the judges have any warning signs that I am Mr. Vogue, I must submit the standard number of audition songs required of every contestant. “They probably won’t ask you to sing any more than the two you’ve prepared,” adds the producer, unreassuringly. I think I may projectile vomit. I add “You Couldn’t Be Cuter,” “Somewhere Only We Know,” and “Someone Like You,” try to remember the lyrics, and pray to the Baby Jesus that I don’t get called on to perform them.

Far sooner than I might have hoped, the Prudential Center heaves into view. Confident in my disguise, I swagger in. I am Leo Mercuré. “Isn’t that the guy who owns Vogue?” asks one of the security guards. “Wicked shoes.”

“Well, I once gave Anna Wintour a blow-out,” I reply. “She was very difficult. But I really get a kick out of making ordinary women look beautiful.” Convincing?

Wendy had suggested I take beta blockers for my nerves, but I thought I should feel the fear. Now I am not so sure. By the time I reach the area where my fellow contestants are waiting, my terror is so real it practically has a heartbeat.

An anxious brunette is swanning around in a strapless evening gown like Solo in the Spotlight Barbie, while another contestant is inexplicably gyrating with a hula hoop. Most have headsets on and are lost in their own private worlds, deeply contemplative. Many are surrounded by flotillas of friends and family—one teen duo seems to have brought their entire high school with them. I suddenly feel very alone.

Time is a thief and a bitch, and soon I am being summoned downstairs to the holding area. We can hear someone onstage being loudly booed by the crowd. Would a dramatic fainting spell get me off the hook?

Lazarus Douvos gives my hair a last spray, and the noxious stuff catches in my scrupulously protected throat; now I may genuinely faint. But suddenly I am at the top of the stairs that lead to the stage, and as the curtain is drawn back, I stride forward to the roar of 4,000 people and Paula Abdul in a hot-pink frock.

The audience is wildly responsive; they are loving my look. When Simon asks, I prune my age, and there is still a satisfyingly admiring murmur from the crowd. Simon probes. (“I’m very nosy,” he says. “I want to know what makes people tick.”) Are you married, Leo? Who did you come here with? (My stylist.) Who did your makeup? Why do you want to win The X Factor? (“So that I don’t have to return the shoes.”)

When I announce my song choice, Simon’s eyebrow arches, but the crowd goes wild. And then the backing track starts, and the roller-coaster ride begins. Joan and Wendy (in different ways) kept telling me that everything we were learning—the technique and the gestures and the phrasing—were just helpful tools. When I was up onstage I would get lost in the moment. I didn’t really understand what they meant—until now. A soaring adrenaline rush, and an urgent desire to give all these lovely people a few minutes of fun, practically lifts me above the stage.

For the first “Oops,” I give them a saucy little hip swing (as though I’d been pinched on the bum), which seems to amuse the audience no end; several “Oops”es later, some of them are up and gyrating themselves, and I can even see a giggly Simon and Paula mouthing the word and bumping their hips together.

As the roller coaster careens onward I lose the beat, panic, but—trying to think of it as a careless bra strap—I hitch it up and sally onward. (“No one really cares if you lose it,” said Wendy. “We care how you recover it.”)

It is far from my best performance, but I am starting to really enjoy it; high on the audience’s warmth, my voice finally seems to take off in lyric flight (I remember Liza’s admonition to “sing it real pretty at the end”). There just remains the lurking panic of how I will deal with the campy dialogue at the end of the song. On the edge of that precipice, in the half breath before the dialogue begins, I see Simon’s editorial arm rising, pull myself back from the giddying edge, and stop as bidden. (“I can feel what’s going on around me,” Simon explains to me later. “You’ve got to listen to the audience.” During Leo’s turn he “felt the air leaving the room, I’m afraid—and they were rooting for you.”)

Frankly, I am so relieved that it takes a moment to sink in that I will not be slaying them with my killer “Smile.”

“Thank you, Leo,” says Simon. “We’re just going to go to a straight yes or a no, I think. L.A.?”

“That was the first I ever heard a ‘proper’ version of Britney Spears,” says Nicole, laughing. “And I really liked it. You’re a lot of fun, Leo, you are. But I don’t know if it’s what I’m looking for today, so I’m going to have to say no. Thank you.”

“You’re an exquisite odd bird, really,” says Paula, genuinely straining to break it to me gently. “I would love to hang out with you. I adore you, and it was fun, but . . . not for the $5 million prize.”

“Leo, nice to meet you, but it’s a no,” says Simon. “Thank you.”

“He was fly, man,” says L.A. as I walk offstage, euphoric with relief that I have been spared a hatchet job. “I loved his stuff,” adds Paula. I am still high when backstage a middle-aged woman asks my entourage, “Did he win? I loved him!” Someone else wants an autograph.

We repair to a dressing room where one of Simon’s long-term producers joins us for the photo shoot with Simon. He seems genuinely euphoric. “He’s a star!” he says enthusiastically. “I thought your singing was going to be absolutely terrible, but it was really good. The comedic timing was genius. I thought you must be a professional comedian.”

“What I was thinking was, Great, our first Brit, so excited,” says Simon. “And then you were rubbish. Not to be rude!”

Later that evening, I watch the final 20 auditions. There is some reassurance in knowing that I was not quite the worst performer of the day, and that I had been spared Simon’s most unforgiving barbs (“You’ve arrived but you left your voice at home”), not to mention the heckling of a very funny drag queen behind me (“You bettah sing that song, girl!”). There were also performances that made the spine tingle.

How on Earth would the judges make their decisions? “You are giving someone who really thought they couldn’t have another shot a chance to do something with their lives,” Simon explains. “It’s exciting and terrifying.” What is he looking for?

“Something different,” he tells me. “Over the last two years there’s been a massive shift—I would describe it as going from black-and-white into color. It’s Lady Gaga and a new species of superwoman pop star; Beyoncé, with Rihanna nipping at her heels—I call them killers; nothing is ever going to stand in their way! I find that fascinating; I was hoping we were going to find that. You’ve got to be relevant to what is happening in the world, not just now but in a year’s time.”

Leo Mercuré may not have proved himself the next Gaga, but on one level he took the prize. “You fooled us, Hamish,” said Simon, “so full marks to you.”